How Does Anyone Do This?
I've just spent approximately two hours working on one stanza of my wretched poem. It didn't start off wretched -- I feel, very keenly, that my first (free verse) draft was far more successful than my formal verse attempts have been. And yet I continue to try to force this thing. Two weeks ago I began trying to rewrite the second section of my poetry manuscript in formal verse. I'm writing something that approximates a fairytale, and is narrative in nature. So I thought I'd try Edmund Spenser's Spenserian stanza, which is written in iambic hexameter and ends with an "Alexandrine" line (an iambic heptameter line, which employs a caesura, and forms a couplet). This is according to Lewis Turco's Book of Forms, which I'm kind of regarding like my bible right now, and trolling every so often for options regarding form and also to just make sure I'm on the right track. As you'll see from my first post, I thought it went well. And then a day o...